Song of The Day: Here It Goes Again - Artist: OK Go

That’s right. Although I preferred the Xbox 360 for consumer reasons, John prefers it for “developer” reasons. Read all about the CES interview here.

GI: You talked a lot about the Xbox 360. What are your thoughts on the PlayStation 3 now that you’ve had more time on it?

Carmack: We’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and we’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony’s.

[segment deleted]

I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but they’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, let’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3’s strengths. I suspect they’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasn’t clear a year ago. A lot of people were thinking it’s going to be a rerun of the last generation, and it’s now looking like it might not be. I’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think they’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. It’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, it’s not even that it’s ugly–they just took a design decision that wasn’t the best from a development standpoint.

This isn’t that surprising to me. This is dated, but when I developed on a Net Yaroze way-back-when for prototyping purposes, it had some familiar tools like a GCC cross compiler for Windows 95 and other helpful tools and libraries. However, they were all fairly “rough” for compiling, creating objects, converting meshes, and transferring assets to the console. At the time I coughed this up to buying the “prototype machine” versus the $20K version. Also, there wasn’t the Microsoft comparison. Now, the comparison comes to light because of Microsoft’s pre-XBox mission and “culture” of catering–or trying to cater–to developers. Although Microsoft hasn’t gotten too many points on aesthetic appeal or on certain technologies, they have tried to be developer friendly. Being able to use Visual Studio and MSDN-type help for Xbox development has to be nice for some folks. Sony was new to broad developer support back in the PS1 days and still is relatively new to the developer support game overall. Oh, and of course I believe Carmack (image below) :).

The asymmetric CPU issue caught my attention as well. Supposedly, a Sony 3D artist was fired for complaining about the difficulties with the PS3/development environment on his blog. As far as the CPU model, here is a decent overview of the advantages and challenges with the asymmetric design. If I find a link to other PS3 IDE challenges I’ll post them. Regarding asymmetric designs, so much time is spent making symmetric multiprocessor designs more deterministic (e.g., locking), I don’t even want to think about a model even “more” indeterministic :). May be faster on instructions and I/O, but there is more to consider IMHO (i.e., like getting Carmack-like folks as fans).

On a non sequitur note I bet Apple is working, or will eventually work, on a game “capable” home theatre machine. There are just too many points of leverage (i.e., OS X, good graphics, Apple TV, good developer support, and good hardware) for them to stay out of the market.

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